Hard on the Homeless, Light on the Landlords
A bleak summary of how our current attitudes towards housing effects those most vulnerable
At the start of the year, I received a DM on Instagram from a follower sharing a story about a man who was sleeping rough in a pop tent on a main street of Whangārei, in front of a real estate agency, who was trespassed from the street which also contains the city’s only day centre for people living rough.
Since reading that article, I’ve spent the last six months reading headlines on our government's hardline on anti-social behaviors, investing $3b in tax cuts for landlords, taking away renters’ rights, stopping the Māori health authority, and barely investing in mental health services or giving funding to Mike King.
Last week my mind went back to that image of police dismantling a tent in front of a real estate agency, as it unfortunately seemed to encapsulate our priorities as a country. How we have aggrandized landlords at the expense of funding in high-need areas, the removal of renters’ rights as rents continue to rise during a cost-of-living crisis, the removal of incentives to help get first-home buyers into homes, and the general absolute lack of affordable housing across the country.
So to vent my frustrations, I got to work drawing it up:
It’s pretty easy to predict how National will deal with the increasing rate of those sleeping rough, as it will more than likely fall into their “tough on crime” rhetoric. These MPs will always point to the rise of “anti-social behavior” on main streets and point the blame on rough sleepers or those in emergency housing, even to the extent of using it as an argument against emergency housing.
In fact, it was part of their 100-day plan, calling emergency housing “one of the biggest public policy failures in New Zealand history” and admitted that they “can't guarantee more people won't end up homeless” due to the changes.
The term “anti-social behavior” is a polite way to scare people, to make it seem that all people sleeping rough or in emergency housing are dangerous and unpredictable, rather than having to talk about mental health issues, wealth inequality, high cost of basics including food, our fucked housing/renting, and racial inequality/ingrained racism/effects of colonization on Indigenous people.
Getting rid of emergency housing but doing absolutely nothing about rent control, the housing market, or our underfunded mental health system shows that we either don’t understand how people get into situations where they end up sleeping rough, or we would rather sweep it under the carpet and ignore it. After watching the government cull so many important programs to fund a $3b landlord tax cut, my guess would be the latter.
To be fair, it’s not like Labour did a whole lot better, they also dropped the ball on our mental health system, and don’t even get me started on capital gains.
But it’s still so disheartening to think where that $3b could have gone if we had a leadership team that worked for all of New Zealand, and not just those with beach houses in the Coromandel.
Danz
Withdrawn of support for those needing it, and the reduction of services to the middle classes is happening all over the first world.
It's because in the last 30 years, governments of all types are increasingly controlled by the rich.
There's a book out " Soon You Will Own Nothing"
Revolution is looking increasingly like the only solution. Govenments are not going to reverse this trend..